I’ve been involved in ministering to different ages and life stages in the church ever since I was saved. But today it looks very different than it did when I started. About 15 years ago, I encountered something very basic: families were really hurting and I started to ask “Is what we’re doing really biblical?”

After serving in youth ministry, going to seminary, and becoming a senior pastor, it was programs, programs, programs. It seemed like we were always on some tweaking journey, just introducing one innovation after another to give it more ‘creative crank.' I started asking, “Is this what pastors are supposed to do?”

I began to believe that this whole family fragmenting ministry that I had dedicated so much of my life to was actually hurting families and churches. And maybe it was even contributing to this youth exodus we saw from the church. I kept asking, “Is scripture sufficient? Is this whole age-graded approach to discipleship really biblical?” I remember at one point really struggling to articulate my increasing concern to my fellow elders who are some of my dearest brothers even today. I drew a graph at that elders meeting to illustrate my thoughts and I listed all the different ministries that we were laboring to provide for our congregation and what function they were meant to fulfill. Then I added another category: “Fragments of family.”

One thing we found in our church was that the family had little opportunity to ever worship together. But our church wasn’t any different than every other church I had ever attended. And then I realized that I am part of the problem. This is the only thing that I have ever done and that graph just illustrated pictorially what I had been wrestling with in my mind for a long time. It was during those years that my thinking regarding this whole kind of ministry under went a radical transformation. Scripture was sufficient for the design of discipleship.

During that time, Church and Family Life was established. Looking back on the past decade, I’ve seen enormous fruit. Over 30 years ago, I began as a young youth pastor in California crying out to God for the souls of the youth in my community. I’m so grateful that I am no longer left to dream up my own innovations only to find out too late that God had a more beautiful design. Returning to that design is our hope for communicating the gospel in the 21st century.